John Ringo - Von Neumann’s War

“We’ll discuss that part of the mission more later in a breakout session, Dr. Fisher. If that is it, we’ll continue?”

“Sure.” Dr. Fisher sat back down, his forehead furrowed in thought.

“Let’s see, where was I?” Roger said as he turned back to the screen and read through the chart to himself. “Oh yeah, our launch window is approximately three weeks in duration over the last three weeks of August with at least a daily twenty-seven minute launch window. So, we’re bound to be able to hit one of them.” Roger clicked the slide laser pointer button and waved the laser spot over several different trajectory maps showing the different launch dates, times, and trip-times per trajectory. Twenty-one different trajectories curved out from an elliptical Earth orbit and curved directly into Mars’ heliocentric orbital path.

“Another thing to remember here, folks, is that launch is a whole heck of a lot more than just lift-off. I’ve taken the liberty to summarize these steps from the SMAD and various previous mission timelines. You’ll find the steps on the next page of the briefing. Launch team, I want you to start breaking them down and populating the steps with more detail.”

“Uh, Roger, I hate to interrupt again.” John Fisher stood up, again. “But four upper stages on a Delta IV Heavy hasn’t ever been done either. I mean, granted I work for LockMart and I know more about the Atlas systems, but they’re very similar. I just don’t know. And you’re showing one of the stages here consisting of three connected and even modified kick motors. How do you think we can pull that off in less than five months? I’m not even thinking design process, bad as that’s going to be, I’m thinking man hours here.”

“John, we’ll do it because we have to,” Roger replied seriously. “This isn’t something that we’re doing for fun or because of science that we can let overrun the budget and slip in schedule. There is literally something dramatically changing Mars and what if, just what if, Earth is next? I want to get that point across as sincerely as I possibly can. If this is the beginnings of an alien contact, onslaught, or whatever, we need to know and we need to know it as soon as humanly possible. Sooner.”

“We can do it, potentially, but only with dispersed production and every production facility on triple shift,” Fisher said, nodding in understanding. “These modifications alone might cost fifty to a hundred million dollars. Do we have that kind of budget?”

“Yes,” was all Roger said. Despite his little pep talk it was apparent that many of them hadn’t grasped the magnitude of the problem.

“Let me make this clear,” Roger said, taking a deep breath. “We have the budget. We have the backing. We have anything we want. Any facility, any person, any piece of equipment being produced for the United States government and probably anything being produced for anyone anywhere in the world. That being said, the first company that screws with this program since there’s so much money being thrown at it will get reamed a new one and probably broken. But we have the budget. We have any budget it takes to get this done. But we’re not funding a welfare program for rocket scientists. This is about using off-the-shelf components to get a mission completed to find out if there is a threat to the world . And we will do it and we will do it on time, budget be damned .”

He paused for a minute for the auditorium to settle, then he continued with the briefing.

“Okay, cruise phase of the mission begins once Percival is in a safe and stable configuration after the control maneuvers at the end of the launch sequence. The best we’ve come up with thus far for transit time from Earth to Mars is about four to five months — feel free to discuss with Dr. Powell transit time optimization if you wish. The cruise trajectory will deliver the spacecraft to Mars on a southern approach trajectory where we’ll begin taking reconnaissance data. In fact, our plan is to passively collect data for the entire trip. Who knows, it might be useful. We also suggest one active sensor, which we’ll discuss in a minute.

“During the cruise phase we’ll have time to catch our breath and to conduct some on-board systems diagnostics. We’ll have two teams: one for checkouts and calibrations and the other for trajectory optimization and correction maneuvers. Also, at this time the recon operations team will, as I said previously, begin shaking down the passive science instruments and start taking data.

“As a side note here, we’ve looked for a space qualified 50- to 100-centimeter aperture diameter telescope that was designed for any previous classified or unclassified mission that could be commandeered for this mission. Unfortunately, we have not found one anywhere. So, in the interim we will, today, develop the telescope design parameters. Then we finish the optical design from these requirements within the next two weeks from this kickoff meeting. The structural design will be complete a few weeks later. We’re already talking to CTI, Lightworks, Composite Optics, and Zeiss optics companies with the hopes that one of these companies can complete the task of constructing our telescope to our design requirements, successfully, within the schedule required. We’ll give all four companies a contract with the hopes that redundant teams will give us a better chance for success and less risk. Telescope team, we’ll break out after this session and get to work. I have some preliminary design characteristics we can start from. I’m wide open for suggestions though.”

One of the optics designers interrupted with a raised hand.

“Uh, Dr. Reynolds, I’m Carla Watts from Zeiss. I have a question.”

“Yes, Carla?” Roger breathed an inaudible sigh to himself. He knew that he had to take and answer the questions. But they took time .

“Does the primary have to be a build from super lightweight like other space optics?” She paused for a second, removed her glasses, and rubbed her nose. “Or could we hog one out of a heavy piece of glass or Zerodur or something. I mean, the reason I ask this is that, there might be big blanks lying around in this aperture diameter range that could be ground out. That would be a lot quicker than building the lattice, filling, baking and all the rest.”

“What would that do to our mass budget?” Roger asked.

“Well,” Carla screwed up her faced in thought for a moment. “It might as much as double it. But, and this sounds like a critical but, it would decrease build time by at least a factor of two, maybe more.”

“Okay. Let’s keep this idea on the table as an option. During the break could you call around and see if you could locate such blanks?”

“Sure. I think I know where there might even be one with a hole already in the center for a Schmidt-Cassegrain design.”

“Good, thanks. Back to the cruise phase: the ops guys will train the telescope pointing algorithms on Mars early on so that the pointing and tracking closed loop software will have learned to minimize the pointing jitter by the time it gets to Mars.

“The final phase will be the approach and the detailed recon phase. Since we don’t plan to orbit Mars, our goal is to collect data from a few months out and right up until the spacecraft passes by the planet and views it from the other side. We’re open to clever ideas about how to extend the mission operation lifetime, but we have yet to come up with anything brilliant in that regard. The spacecraft will pass by Mars at about fifteen kilometers per second, so close approach dwell time will not be very long. During the final phase, Percival will point its active science instruments, such as the lidar, at Mars. During the active part of the recon phase we’ll implement an alternate beam path through the primary telescope objective with a lidar system. Hopefully, we can gather some sub-meter three-dimensional imagery from the laser imaging and ranging system. We intend to take the old canceled and mothballed NASA SPARCLE program’s lidar instruments, dust them off, and update them.”